High Availability in Exchange 2010

Exchange 2010 uses a new mechanism for High Availability. Watch this interresting movie from one of the members of the Exchange 2010 team.

 exchange_2010_ha

 The continuous availability architecture built into Exchange 2010 provides new benefits for organizations and their messaging administrators:

  • Multiple server roles can co-exist on servers that provide high availability. This enables small organizations to deploy a two-server configuration provides full redundancy of mailbox data, while also providing redundant Client Access and Hub Transport services.
  • An administrator no longer needs to build a failover cluster in order to achieve high availability. Failover clusters are now created by Exchange 2010 in a way that is invisible to the administrator. Unlike previous versions of Exchange clusters which used an Exchange-provided cluster resource DLL named ExRes.dll, Exchange 2010 no longer needs or uses a cluster resource DLL. Exchange 2010 uses only a small portion of the failover cluster components, namely, its heartbeat capabilities and the cluster database, in order to provide database mobility.
  • Administrators can add high availability to their Exchange 2010 environment after Exchange has been deployed, without having to uninstall Exchange and then re-deploy in a highly availability configuration.
  • Exchange 2010 provides a view of the event stream that combines the events from the operating system with the events from Exchange.
  • Because storage group objects no longer exist in Exchange 2010, and because mailbox databases are portable across all Exchange 2010 Mailbox servers, it is very easy to move databases when needed.

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